SharePoint improvements have been built and incorporated out of the box because/thanks to ISV's, Flow (now PowerAutomate) is a direct inspiration and competition from one of MS historical partners in the SharePoint space called Nintex.

They absolutely compete, they absolutely steal ideas and they do so by getting their partners to willingly show them what they are working on. For any ISV worth their salt in the MS world, they know this and hopefully they have a plan for when that ultimately happens.

The one thing that Microsoft keeps focusing on is IT related stuff, whether it's software or hardware, it's still in the IT realm 90% of the time. On the other hand as you pointed out yourself, Amazon does everything and doesn't think twice to enter a new market if it thinks it can aggressively compete and gain a significant market share.

Similarly, both Amazon and Google do not have an engrained culture of working with partners the same way that Microsoft does, they do work with some don't get me wrong, but it's nowhere near what Microsoft does and how it behaves. It's no surprise that the Co-Sell program at Microsoft is so successful, it's pushed by the Higher ups and all the way down to the field sales people live and breathe it. Google is trying to do something similar but you can tell (if you work or have worked with both sides) that the google side doesn't care as much as Microsoft.

You can craft artisanal hand napkins; tomorrow morning 365 Everyday launches their new premium hand napkins with free same-day shipping.

So now every dollar you spend hosting your e-commerce site is directly funding your competitor, which is able to out perform you on the back of insane profits from things like... AWS

1) Most large orgs already have Exchange/AD/SharePoint infrastructure. Move that into the cloud and boom, you’re already an Azure customer whether you noticed it or not. Want to take some more IaaS services on? Want a cloud SCM?... Don’t worry about procurement, you’re already a customer.

2) Procurement decisions in large organisations have to satisfy a lot of different stakeholders. A big, reputable vendor, that can solve a huge number of your problems all at once is remarkably attractive to such an organisation. Azure doesn’t have the same features as AWS, but that doesn’t matter. Most of the decision makers don’t care, and the technical teams aren’t likely to use the fancy AWS services anyhow. Forklifting their infrastructure into the cloud was a enough effort to begin with.

This model is very common in enterprise software/services. Symantec and Cisco are other examples of a companies exploiting the same dynamics. Their products are mostly garbage, they go around acquiring other products, and then poorly incorporating them into their portfolio. But they have a large market share to sell new things into, and when they’re talking to their customers they can pitch “just buy all of our products, and that’s like 80% of your compliance worries solved. No need to deal with 10 vendors”.

It's a genius move considering their customers who are already embedded in SQL and Microsoft Server.

Source: we're a heavy MS SQL shop, but are on AWS and are regularly approached by MS with their offers.

Procurement decisions usually start with AWS.

This perspective isn’t shared by a lot of big companies. For most smaller, younger, technically oriented organisations, this is true. But large enterprises have a complete different set of values, priorities, and ways of doing things. The kind of organisations that are used to running huge Exchange, AD, SharePoint infrastructure often don’t see things that way, and often won’t be able to get much value out of AWS’s feature advantages over Azure anyway.

Of course you’ll find examples of large enterprise that love AWS, or GCP, but having witnessed how a lot of procurement decisions play out in these kinds of organisations, it’s absolutely not surprising to me to see Azure doing well I’m this segment. Especially for organisations that have invested heavily in GPO over the decades, I think a lot of them see AD alone as a killer feature.

This always had a vibe of a conspiracy theory to me. If this were to ever happen and it came out, AWS would be screwed for all eternity. You just need one disgruntled employee to keep a screenshot of their auditing logs to make all hell break loose. I think most companies who actually consider this to be part of their threat model are full of themselves to actually think that Amazon would do this to their brand and the trust associated with it for the benefit of looking into systems that most likely don't contain information that's as interesting as company execs and engineers think.

I once knew someone who forbid his employees to use Google because he said that Google would copy his ideas and that his employees would leak them if they even searched for related key words.

Then Amazon used the retail sales information they gathered from these relationships to structure their Marketplace and Fulfilled by Amazon products, breaking the exclusivity clauses in their existing supplier agreements. Amazon lost lawsuits over this.

Kinda hard to call it a conspiracy theory when Amazon is upfront and out loud about their intention to use customer data to enter new markets whenever they see fit.

A thuggish business, I can see doing the above.

But Amazon hacking logs of customer data to get a leg up in some category, no way. That's a different ballgame.

Every retail org would have to immediately leave AWS hands down.

Apple depends on Samsung for many of its components and Google pays Apple billions a year to be the default search engine. Companies cooperate and compete with each other all the time.

I love Amazon's cloud services and use them every day. Even so, you can't lose site of the fact they are a formidable competitor.

It's that Amazon competes in many markets, and paying millions and millions to AWS is a benefit to Amazon, period.

Why fund a competitor when you could fund not-competitor?

They may not touch AWS, but the stink from their Amazon related actions definitely affects big companies making decisions AWS.

Windows ISVs and other OS providers excepted, of course ...

With a leopard this old, it’s hard to tell if it has changed its spots or it’s just covered with old dirt. What I do know is if you get bit I don’t want to hear about it. I’ll just laugh and laugh in your face.

LOL indeed.

Edit: just had a flashback to /. - is it “embrace, extend, extinguish”?

At the low-end, Office 365 now includes web-based invoices, bookings (a la hairdresser appointments), and the like.

Middle-tier would be using something from their former Great Plains titles (now under the Dynamics brand). And at the high-end, that’d be a partner-customised build of MS Dynamics.

Now all they have to do is bring back Microsoft Money!

They call it Excel.

Which is sadly not as facetious as it sounds. Microsoft's smaller finance tools had to compete not just externally with Intuit's and Peachtree/Sage's products but internally with Excel, and Excel has long held steady somewhere in the second or third most commonly used personal and small business finance tool.

(Source/disclaimer: I was a college intern for what for most of my time there was called Microsoft Small Business Accounting, briefly in my experience there was called Microsoft Office Accounting, and sadly didn't survive as a product during the time it took me to finish my degrees. IMNSHO it was a really good product, and I'm sad it never had the chance it deserved, because it sadly wasn't possible to beat Excel for market penetration, even bundled right next to Excel.)

These are all tool makers and basically competitors.

And frankly for the vast majority of them they actually bought the alternatives. For example, they bought Skype for messaging, they bought Great Plains, etc.

Skype was in prime position to be the best way to have free voice and video-calls between iOS and Android phones and the wider Internet (seeming as FaceTime is Apple-exclusive and Hangouts seems unpopular) - I don’t know what happened but WhatsApp ate Skype’s lunch and got bought by FB and the rest is history.

Skype on my iPhone X is just painful. I use it to make cheap PSTN calls when I’m abroad and simple things like switching to Speakerphone mode takes 2-3 seconds and involves opening the iOS audio output list (which has an animated opening for some reason) instead of every other app which has a single speaker button. This is but one example, of course.

They could have bought Slack, but they competed with MS Teams instead - but doing-so awfully because they still don’t have multi-tenant support in the client. Thing is - I can’t say that competing with Microsoft has made Slack any better (case-in-point: last month’s always-on WYSIWYG editor debacle).

Now take two iOS smartphones, where Skype will only run when the user is focused on the app. The peer-to-peer link was simply not going to happen. Skype brilliant peer-to-peer architecture simply didn't work anymore. This is why Skype was so late to the party.

I don't think there's some latent distrust of AWS or that people really equate Windows being good means Azure is good - I think it's known Amazon has top tier support, really great reliability and security (like Azure), as well as seemingly the best selection.

GCP for example isn't even in the running for most people even though I'd say Google is probably considered the 'brainiest' tech co.

Source: talked to folks at banks, a handful of startups, and manufacturers who've gone with Azure or AWS when deciding for our biz.

Aren't there laws to prevent this? Say I am a big retailer - target, aldi or some company at that scale using AWS. Are you saying Amazon can look into my database/code etc and learn from it and use that knowledge to compete with me? Shouldn't such a thing be illegal, though it would super hard to prove?

Their reasoning seemed a bit paranoid, but it wasn't that Amazon would secretly start mining their data there without telling them, it's that this retailer would invest 10's (even 100's) of millions of dollars in tools and infrastructure on AWS and then AWS would change their terms and conditions to allow them to look at/share data 'legally' and the retailer would be so in the hole in terms of investment/technology they couldn't leave/stop them without losing millions. They saw it as risk mitigation.

I think it's _incredibly_ unlikely this would ever happen, but if you combine that with "I don't want to give one of our biggest competitors a cent" it ends up with policies like this

Simple stuff that shows up on your bill, such as the amount of data transfer, the sizes of your databases and how they change, etc is enough.

I doubt there are laws that prevent them from doing deep dives into your data but that’s not really the concern. I don’t expect them to do that.

However, when it comes to trying to solve problems, create bespoke apps, as a retailer you will probably be far more comfortable sharing the information about your data with a Microsoft rep than an AWS rep helping you build that bespoke solution.

Potentially yes but when have big tech ever played by the rules though. Its hard to name a single FAANG company that hasn't used terrible/outright illegal practises to get to the top.

They are risking 1 Trillion dollars in lawsuits, for what?

I don't think that this is happening in any detail, however, maybe some high level things, such as account size, configuration etc. - that information could be leaked. But some category manager at Amazon.com husting the logs from Nodrstrom on AWS ... I don't think so.

MS claim to fame was by providing tools to a partner and directly competing with their partner.

"In 1985, IBM requested Microsoft to develop a new operating system for their computers called OS/2. Microsoft produced that operating system, but also continued to sell their own alternative, which proved to be in direct competition with OS/2."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft